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Abstract

The present research proposes that empathic concern, as assessed by six items of the
ERQ, consists of two separate emotions, i.e., tenderness and sympathy. To test this
assumption, nine studies were conducted among, in total, 1,273 participants. In these
studies participants were presented with a hypothetical scenario of someone in need,
after which empathic concern was assessed. Factor analyses showed that, indeed, the
ERQ items that assess empathic concern can be split up in two factors, that is, one
reflecting sympathy and one reflecting tenderness. In addition, in line with previous
studies, our research showed that, in response to a need-situation that reflects current
needs, individuals scored higher on the ERQ factor reflecting sympathy than on the
ERQ factor reflecting tenderness. Findings are discussed in terms of the practical
and theoretical implications of distinguishing between sympathy and tenderness.

Recent work on natural categories suggests a framework for conceptualizing people's knowledge about emotions. Categories of natural objects or events, including emotions, are formed as a result of repeated experiences and become organized around prototypes (Rosch, 1978); the interrelated set of emotion categories becomes organized within an abstract-to-concrete hierarchy. At the basic level of the emotion hierarchy one finds the handful of concepts (love, joy, anger, sadness, fear, and perhaps, surprise) most useful for making everyday distinctions among emotions, and these overlap substantially with the examples mentioned most readily when people are asked to name emotions (Fehr & Russell, 1984), with the emotions children learn to name first (Bretherton & Beeghly, 1982), and with what theorists have called basic or primary emotions. This article reports two studies, one exploring the hierarchical organization of emotion concepts and one specifying the prototypes, or scripts, of five basic emotions, and it shows how the prototype approach might be used in the future to investigate the processing of information about emotional events, cross-cultural differences in emotion concepts, and the development of emotion knowledge.